15

In August 2013, I leaned back in my office chair, staring at the dots scattered across the Google Earth map. It had been five years since the Malapa discovery—one among many of those dots representing the entrances to caves or former caves that had lost their roofs and now left breccia exposed on the landscape.

Work at Malapa had stopped for the moment while a large protective structure was being assembled at the site. Ultimately called the Beetle, this structure would perch over the little site like a giant insect, offering a platform for the excavators and protecting the site from the elements. Until it was finished, our team would not be able to work on-site. Much of the team was occupied completing the final research papers on the sediba material anyway. Things were coming to a natural pause—and I was itching to go exploring again.

I had surveyed the sites shown by all of those dots on the map back in 2008, but I wanted a second look. There were new caves there. I had done an underground search with some of my caving buddies in the 1990s as part of the Atlas Project, but we hadn’t come up with much. Now I suspected there were hundreds of underground systems we hadn’t seen. These dots were doorways to an underworld, with potential new discoveries.

Just then, someone knocked on my office door. It was Pedro Boshoff, wearing a red knit cap with a bobble on top and clutching his hands in front of himself. He was also barefoot. For the many years I had known him, Pedro had always hated shoes.

Pedro was a former student of mine who had planned to write his master’s thesis on how hyenas use caves but who had vanished years before without finishing the degree. I knew he had gone off diamond mining in central and West Africa, because he had dropped in once a few years back and told me about the slim fruits of that labor. He had also been one of my caving buddies back in the 1990s.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

Pedro looked like he was about to cry. “May I speak with you for a minute?”

That conversation stretched to over an hour. Diamond prospecting had failed him. He lamented leaving paleoanthropology years before—it was a mistake, and could I possibly do anything for him?

I watched Pedro carefully as he spoke. I knew he had the skills for underground work. Besides being ex-military, he was a longtime member of the local caving society. He had been lucky in finding fossils before and had actually discovered the first hominin teeth at the new site of Drimolen back in 1994, although circumstances had kept him from being recognized for that discovery.

His appearance at just that moment seemed serendipitous. I wasn’t entirely confident that Pedro might not up and disappear again, and I didn’t have any funds for exploration at the moment, but here was someone who could find fossils, and I thought he deserved a chance. I had enough reserves in my budget, and so I offered him an exploration job. After he had left, I called my laboratory manager, Bonita de Klerk, into the office. “I want you to contact procurement and see how I might go about buying a motorcycle through the university,” I told her. Bonita had become tolerant of my odd requests over the years, but this one left her shaking her head.

Two weeks later, Pedro was back in my office to report on his first efforts, motorcycle helmet in hand. I had asked him to start first in the Sterkfontein Valley. My experience discovering Malapa, such a short distance away from where I had spent 17 years digging at Gladysvale, had taught me a lesson. The places you think you know best might surprise you.

But Pedro had found that the caves in the area were full of narrow, tight passages, and the years had added some kilos to his frame. It was also too dangerous to work alone. “I want to bring on some amateurs,” he said. “I’ve met these two youngsters, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker. They are good guys, pretty new to caving, but I can trust them.”

I nodded as I listened. I had not enlisted amateur assistance in exploration before, and I was asking Pedro to do work that was a specialized skill. But if we were going into unexplored areas of caves, we needed people with the right physical build to get into the deeper systems. Pedro was also right that caving alone was dangerous and downright stupid. I made a snap decision. “OK, show them what we’re after and send them out.”

Weeks went by, August into September. Pedro would call me with updates, or drop by my office with reports of their frequent caving trips. He was dividing the search between sites to the west, in the vicinity of Sterkfontein, and locations farther east, where he had a hunch there were new things to find. Steven and Rick seemed to be working out great. They were evidently keen on joining the project and ready to go out any night they could after work.

On September 14, my cell phone rang. It was Pedro. “Rick and Steven think they found something good!”

People have approached me many times over the years with reports of finding some great thing, and it usually turns out to be less than advertised. But you never know for sure, so I always take the time to at least look at photos. “Bring me pictures,” I said, hanging up and promptly forgetting about the conversation as I moved on to editing a sediba manuscript.

Two more weeks passed, with occasional updates from Pedro, and I heard nothing more about Steven and Rick’s purported discovery until the last day of September. Pedro again called me. Rick and Steven have pictures, he said, and he was going to meet up with them to take a look. I gave him appropriate words of encouragement and hung up, not giving the call another thought.

IT WAS NINE O’CLOCK at night on October 1, and I sat at home at my kitchen counter, finishing off the day’s emails. It had been a long day for me at Malapa, visiting the construction of the Beetle, and when I got home I turned off my cell phone. The buzz of the front gate intercom surprised me. We almost never had visitors that late at night. I could see the headlights of a car shining through the gate as I curiously picked up the receiver.

“You’re going to want to let us in!”

It was Pedro. I will admit now that the strange tone in his voice gave me a few seconds of hesitation about letting “us” in, whoever that was, but a few minutes later Pedro was standing in my dining room with a tall, skinny man with brown, unkempt hair.

So this was Steven. Pedro introduced us hastily, his body language telegraphing his excitement.

“So what do you have?” I asked.

Steven quickly flipped open his laptop and brought a picture up on the screen. There, upon a piece of dirty map paper, was a hominin mandible. A cloth measuring tape next to it gave scale. It wasn’t human; that much was clear. The teeth were in the wrong proportions to be from any recent population. A second image showed more bones, all seemingly hominin. A third showed a rounded, broken white outline in the dirt floor of the cave. It was the right shape to be the cross section of a skull—a tiny skull.

Steven swears I cursed. Might be. By this point in my life, though, I thought I knew better than that.

The pictures, Steven explained, were from a well-explored and well-mapped series of connected cave systems called Empire cave and Rising Star cave. On September 13, Steven and Rick had climbed a large underground rockfall called the Dragon’s Back. When they reached the top, they found a jagged slot that narrowed to a pinch point 18 centimeters wide. I’ve learned that cavers like Steven and Rick look at such narrow openings as opportunities. Steven went in first, and then Rick followed. The squeeze was tight, vertical, and almost 12 meters to the bottom. Luckily for them, it didn’t open up to leave them dangling from the ceiling of a large cavern. A small drop of a couple meters to the bottom, and they found themselves in a chamber. On the floor they found bones, many bones, lying loose there on the floor. Some looked to them like the sort of bones we were after.

But their camera didn’t work.

It had taken them hours of exploration to find this spot, but out they had climbed, up the narrow slot and down the Dragon’s Back, retracing their tortuous path in. This was the discovery they had told Pedro about two weeks earlier. Now they had managed to get back in, and they had made sure the camera worked this time.

I was completely speechless for a moment, flipping back and forth through the pictures. Finally I began to ask questions. I quizzed Steven deeply about the situation of this find. I noticed white areas on the fossils, suggesting some recent damage to them. Steven swore that he and Rick had not done this and had been very careful. He also mentioned that there was a small survey marker on the back wall of the chamber, left by a caver sometime before, who knows when. Whoever it was had not noted the chamber on any map of the cave.

I truly couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Fossil hominin remains just lying on the floor of a cave? It seemed impossible. I got up to get us some beers. Jackie, Megan, and Matthew wandered downstairs to see what the commotion was about. They couldn’t believe those images either. It was nothing short of incredible.